Freesco running at a VMware-Player

VMware is remarkably easy to use. I have recently created a Freesco-box machine. For those who know Freesco, it fits in a floppy as a first installation. Usually Freesco users move installation to the hard-disk -- in a simple configuration step.
In this article I show it is possible to run Freesco in a VMware machine, by using VMware-Player on a Windowzed PC.

It's quite interesting for those who test Freesco.

My initial problem was: how to have the ethernet cards working on a such old Kernel (Freesco uses a 2.0.39 or eventually 2.0.40). The bogus was I wasn't insmod'ing the PCI modules correctly. The default v0.3.2 stock Kernel and modules worked on the first shot (see also an excellent Kernel 2.0.39/40 compilation How-to by Dingetje).

phpgroupware - web applications in one shot

I have started to study about the tool phpGroupWare; some nice screenshots are available at http://linux.softpedia.com/-....

The Debian Sarge unstable package was installed, but I still have issues with suphp module: the config.php entry for the configuration doesn't work yet.
In fact I was searching for a decent DocuWiki-like application. I occasionally stumbled on this package: I gave up of make it work, I will search around successful stories about phpGroupWare around some Linux communities.

Freesco is cheap and works easily

Finding out the perfect firewall = utopia. I picked Freesco: a nice small floppy-based Linux distro, based on a 2.0.x (actually I am using 2.0.39) Kernel. In the creator own words: "single floppy router".

The history of Freesco is nicely described on Dingetje's DocuWiki (dingetje.homeip.net/dokuwiki/freesco/history): I first started with v0.2.7, the first dream version of this nice router; it was stable, outstanding, and as long as the configuration was done by the book (i.e., by using a colored ncurses-based terminal on it's startup, or by entering the setup script), everything works smoothly.

The real dogma on Freesco is that: to fit in a 1.4 Mb small floppy, by default. Obviously a reasonable choice is to install it on a hard-drive, by calling a simple script named 'move2hdd'.

The requirements I did set for my box (the Freesco box) were:

1. provide a permanent Internet firewalled connection for my 4 PCs intranet
2. a web portal
3. a well-served MTA
4. an sshd server
   

The first is real easy to configure, following the installation steps. (It's a are occasion in Linux flavoured distros to have it running by using so few steps of concise indications.)

The second is by default thttpd (personally I do not like this lightweight web server, it's ugly to configure); so when Dingetje has announced his package of the Apache/1.3.27 server I did install it right away (it is still a great package, it worked out of the box -- I just had to change to a decent Kernel with IPC support).

Then the third, took me extra time to have it decently: the ugly Exim3 was by that time the only MTA available; I had to wait for a released package of Exim4 more than a month, so I decided to compile it myself with relevant supported features (Exim4 4.34). For those who haven't compiled packages for Freesco already: it's an annoying process that requires a Zipslack distro, for instance, and then an ugly scheme of scripting -- that should include some level of compatibility checking against previously installed packages.
Philip Hazel (biography) developed this great MTA (I call it the Mail Transfer Agent): he kindly provided me support for some necessary adaptations I had to make on his latest 4.6x releases.
I have Exim 4.60 currently, it works in an excellent way.

The fourth requisite is really easy to have; I prefer to have it firewalled from the outside -- the security (more or less regular) updates are provided by Dingetje -- always working out of the box.

The hardware requisites are really low. Installing Freesco for dummies is here:

• http://bakskuru.se/fredrik/freesco/setup.html

For a simple router, consider two network cards. I have PCMCIA (I use a laptop Pentium 133 MHz, wow, it's really a small & slow box) so I had to install some extra ugly drivers.
I bought this box for about 150 euros (second owner) with 2 PCMCIA adapters, then a 3Com ADSL modem with support for ethernet (do not ever think to have this box running USB!) for 50 euros: the cost of this equipment is around 200 euros in total. Pretty cheap.

Management Techniques

In the company I work for, in the area I am responsible for, a lot of stress is caused by stressed customers. In parallel to software development, lots of high-management issues raise in a daily basis. I am thinking more and more about adopting daily simplified scrum meetings.

Here goes an excerpt of these meetings (http://en.wikipedia.org/...Simplified_Scrum):

These status discussions don't take long, so one way is to do standup meetings where the team meets in front of a whiteboard. Because people tend to get tired after lunch, having a lively standup meeting at that time may keep their energy up. Because everybody has already been working that day, their minds are focused on the job and not on their personal issues.

This is a quite interesting technique, as compared with other kinds of Project Management techniques, for example boring long-run regular meetings.

A more exhaustive approach is to have real scrum meetings, as described at wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/...Scrum_meetings